“Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.”
― E.L. Doctorow

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

What Seems Like An Eternity Decomposing with Andy Rooney

Yes, I know you’re all
sick of it, which assumes I write this blog for anyone aside from myself and
the sad little alien who lives in my mailbox, W. Blinky Gray, but Andy Rooney
won’t leave me alone. He has a lot of opinions about wine and the wine
business, and now that he’s not broadcasting any more, because HE’S DEAD, he
has asked me to communicate his thoughts and grievances. Be grateful. I could
easily be channeling other dead guys, like Chester A. Arthur and his wife Bea. Or James
Suckling. We are at a turning point in the world—there are as many dead people
to talk to as there are living people to talk to. But the dead all speak a
universal language. Insanity, in which I am fluent.

ON ALCOHOL LEVELS

There’s been a lot of discussion in wine chat rooms and on
wine blogs, you know, places where really sad and lonely people hang out to try
and impress each other with their knowledge of a subject that is deeply and
genuinely meaningless, about how much alcohol is appropriate for wine. They
never say anything that makes any sense. Wouldn’t it really be for the best if
wine didn’t have any alcohol at all? Then we could get rid of that stupid
warning label on every bottle of wine, and pregnant women could start operating
heavy machinery again. I’d like that. A woman in a hardhat arouses me, maybe
because it’s been a long time since my hat was hard. And if there weren’t any
alcohol in wine we could drink a lot more of it. Wine wouldn’t be about
quality, it would be about quantity, which would eventually bring down the
prices of even the most expensive wines. Imagine a 2009 Chateau Lafite selling
for twenty dollars. Without the alcohol, it’s probably not even worth that. In
fact, Lafite is utterly worthless without alcohol. Yet this is the thanks
alcohol gets. People want less of it in their wine. These hypocrites who run
their mouths off about alcohol levels pretend they don’t drink the wine for the
alcohol. They say they care about “balance.” Like you’d rather date an anorexic
gymnast than a nice drunk girl. Just drink the wine and stop reading the
alcohol percentage listed on the label. You sound like an idiot.

Yeast work hard to create alcohol, and then they die. Those
people babbling in chat rooms should do the same.

ON MERLOT

I wish everyone would stop talking about Merlot. Merlot is a
subject more tired than Madonna’s vagina. I can say that, I’m old and dead.
Remember when Merlot was the most popular red wine in America? Every
restaurant offered Merlot by-the-glass. I started to think Clos du Bois was
Blanche’s other sister. “I have always depended upon the blindness of
strangers.” It wasn’t long before every wine writer and expert was complaining
about Merlot. They said it was ruined by its success, it was planted in all the
wrong places, and only inexperienced wine lovers were dumb enough to order it
when superior wines like Syrah and Sangiovese were available. But people kept
on buying it. It’s easy to understand
why the wine experts were upset. Merlot had become popular even though wine
critics hadn’t been pushing it, in fact, it was popular despite them.
Sommeliers hated it, but it outsold everything on their esoteric, ego-driven
wine lists. Wine experts don’t like it when the public ignores what they say
and order what they enjoy. Wine isn’t actually about drinking what you like,
though that’s what they always tell you. It’s about drinking what they like.

Then Merlot became unpopular. Most people think it’s because
of one line in a bad movie called “Sideways.” Paul Giamatti, who I think is the
Merlot of actors, I just wish he’d go away, he’s starting to seem cheap, says,
“I won’t drink any f***in’ Merlot.” This line supposedly ruined sales of
Merlot. It didn’t. Hollywood
likes to take credit for everything. Except “John Carter.” And Fatty Arbuckle.

But once Merlot was declared dead, the critics decided to
resurrect it. Now everyone is trumpeting the virtues of Merlot. Merlot is
underrated, Merlot is making a comeback, Merlot should run for President on the
Green Tea Party ticket. Many of these are the same people who couldn’t wait to
see it die--wine journalists and sommeliers. For some reason, they just like to
yammer on about Merlot.

I have a fondness for wine gizmos, I think all men do. Women
don’t really like gizmos as much as men, they’re more practical and more
intelligent. But they buy gizmos for their boyfriends and husbands, like how
you buy chew toys for your dog. Give him something to do. It isn’t really a
bone, but it sure seems like your dog thinks it is.

I have a bunch of those wine gizmos here. This one is a grey
rubber valve that goes into the neck of an open bottle of wine. Then you take
this white gizmo and pretend you’re pumping all of the air out of the bottle.
I’m sure they got this technology from NASA. I’m not sure what kind of boob
thinks this works, but pumping this thing up and down makes boys happy. I don’t
have to tell you why. They all want to do it at least once a day.

Here’s one of my favorite gizmos. It’s an aerator. See, you
put the wine glass underneath it, pour your favorite Pinot Noir through it, and
the wine bubbles and froths and goes into the glass filled with oxygen. This is
supposed to make the wine taste better. All the science says it doesn’t, that
you get the same result just pouring the wine directly into the glass, that the
effect of oxygen on wine takes an hour to happen, but this is fun. It’s like
being a mad scientist. Or maybe Fatty Arbuckle. And people actually believe it
does taste better immediately after going through an aerator, but these are the
same people who think assigning numbers to wine is science too. We need to be
nice to them.

I don’t know about you, but when I go to a wine lover’s
house and he has a bunch of gizmos, I wonder if he actually knows anything
about wine. Wine isn’t about toys. Sex is.

I don't know why Andy Rooney spends so much time talking. Dead people can't talk--except for Robert Parker, that is. He doesn't know he's dead. Jay Miller killed him, but then Parker killed Jay Miller so Parker got a Mulligan. Too bad he used to kill off the 100-point system. Now that he has declared 2009 to be the vintage of the Milennium, what is he going to do for the next 1000 years?

I'll beat Andy knows, and I am betting that he is going to tell us one of these days.

And I must say, I'm fascinated by the references to Fatty Arbuckle, a man clearly from Rooney's time (and conveniently also dead...for quite some time). But like many of Andy's comments (both before and after death), I wonder how many of the HoseMaster's readers know his sordis history....

You may be on the right track, though I haven't yet decided if it's worth pursuing the Mike Wallace angle. Though a dead Wallace interviewing Jay Miller could be fun--a dead horse beating a dead horse.

Samantha,

I love nice drunk girls. I like mean and bossy drunk girls even better! Anorexic gymnasts have Barbie genitalia.

You have never identified whether Andy is in hell or what. I was in hell today; hail decimated my garden and vines of the guy across the road. So I came to hosmaster for a little relief. There is plenty of relief though I did not open a Merlot but went right to real alcohol. It helps when your entire garden and drive have been decimated.I do think Mike Wallace would have a thing or two to say that he didn't already say. Unlike Parker who has said more than he should.There are many great lines today - I love them - some already identified. But I am very tired. Thanks for making the hail hell a little less sad.

Wow, what a lousy day. Sorry. If I gave you a small chuckle, then I'm glad.

Rooney is definitely in Hell, where all the cool people hang out. I'm sure that he and Mike are in their local Hell bar drinking a glass of Gruner Veltliner and wondering why their Viagra stopped working.

Strange days in our climate challenged world. At least we can laugh all the way to the end.

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After 19 years as a Sommelier in Los Angeles, twice named Sommelier of the Year by the Southern California Restaurant Writers' Association, I moved to Sonoma County to explore the other aspects of the wine business. I've spent, OK wasted, 35 years learning about and teaching about and swallowing wine. I am also a judge at the Sonoma Harvest Fair, San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition and the San Francisco International Wine Competition--so I can spit like a rabid llama. I know more about wine than David Sedaris and I'm funnier than James Laube. Stay tuned for an informed but jaded view of everything wine and everything else.

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